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They prefer choice to all else. They get so upset by lack of choices at the outset that they take their toys and go home (or stay pissy in perpetuity). My unconfirmed suspicion is that if we look at their inherent affect towards their choice, it would actually look just like everyone else, but...

Almost certainly. I think it's much more directly applicable to character creation, of course. Now that I have a few minutes..... When you can choose from 10,000 different starting combinations of class/race, you should be able to find the "right one for you." When presented with this wide...

What, like real life? ;) On a similar note, it is worth reflecting that having more choices actually does NOT make people happier. Usually quite the opposite. Look at any TED talk by Barry Schwartz or Dan Gilbert for some illustrations. But the short version is that people who no choices or...

Sometimes. More often, IME, it depended on how much the DM was willing to stand up to his friends. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one around here who played early editions as an adolescent, with adolescents. :confused:

Here's my problem, Dannyalcatraz. You keep talking as if "lifting, dragging, and pushing" as well as all the other "strength based" skills are actually tightly related. They are not, not even within one individual, much less across species. And they have a tangential relationship to combat...

In my line of work, it's usually scalpel fights or if you're less serious, you sneak up and stab someone with a pasteur pipet. Dry ice bombs are the preferred practical joke.

No. You're talking about one very bad metric, strength score, which is practically meaningless. Since you missed most of my point last time, let's try this another way.... Not every muscle in the body gives a hoot about the strength score. Should the Tyrannosaurus Rex be awesome at the...

Point taken. I did, after all, go googly earlier in this very thread about science and the media. I was treating this as more of a "among friends" thing than "for public consumption" thing.

Using base stats has knock on effects that break the flavor to pieces. Let's do a human-chimp, pound for pound comparison again.... Bench press: Chimp with a bullet Dead lift: Human, with a bullet Sled pull: Human, but I'm not sure about the degree of difference Caber toss: pretty sure this...

Heh. Maybe that was a little over the top. Finding a conversational tone about these things is tough, though, since the devil is in details the average person doesn't know about or usually want to know about. I try providing the cocktail party version of some bit of research and one of my...

Well that was dogmatic given the context here. I'm not talking with scientists, about actual science. I'm playing "Bill Nye" here. Do you really think anyone on this website wants to sit through a lecture on the hormones involved in water balance, how different nutrients and activities impact...

Then we are back to a contradiction. What if I want a muscular race to not have inherent, largely counter-intuitive bonuses to hitting things? Fiddling with +2 strength vs +4 strength has a larger in-game impact on combat effectiveness than its in-narrative effect on flavor warrants. To bring...

As Umbran pointed out, the "noise" can swamp the effect size when you're looking at a particular output of a biological system. Remember, a pound isn't very much relative to your total body weight. A salty meal or a low pressure center would be enough to throw the numbers off.

Science is fun, kids! :D

Yes. Usually 2-3 lbs of water. There's something of a fudge factor because urination wasn't controlled for in the data I saw.

Stepping back from physics to biology for a moment... A large percentage of the food you take in exits the body as water, as someone alluded to earlier. Consider the mass of all the liquids you excrete, including sweat and water vapor in your exhalations. Someone above suggested that was a...

Let me elaborate. We claim we can handle complexity, and point to things that are allegedly complex, like economic theory. But the entire thing can, in fact, be summed up very, very simply. The complexity is window-dressing. A fiction we tell ourselves to feel good about what we're doing...

I could not disagree more about complexity. People flatter themselves that they are comfortable with complex ideas, but they believe things are simple. Economic theory? It all reduces to relative worth, which economists think is simple, but psychologists know is a minefield. But if people...

Depends. The game as a whole might be focused on the inter-character conflicts, but if combat with outside threats still takes up a portion of game time.... yeah, it might. If the people playing enjoy that kind of combat, it's a value add, even if it isn't the explicit focus of the campaign...

That change is what I was trying to communicate (I failed, clearly). The system was built for a low stakes game. Certain areas of biological science, engineering, and some others, have changed. Now millions of dollars are at stake in who publishes what and where. The incentives have changed...